Toby Johnson's
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Recollection of Past Lives

During the fascination with
"Eastern religions" in the 60s and early 70s, our generation got
exposed to reincarnation myths, especially the naive sort of
reincarnation that was described in Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical
variation on Hindu Vedanta and that got popularized by Timothy Leary
with the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the myths of the "bardo."

In the naive understanding,
reincarnation offers solace in the face of death by assuring that you
will come back in another life. Just wait. It'll be OK.

Orthodox Buddhism has a much
grimmer notion of reincarnation. For Buddhism imagines the universe as
infinitely long in both directions. So, for them, human souls have been
reincarnating for billions and billions of years, a Cantor set of
previous lifetimes all besot with suffering and longing to get off the
wheel. So the Buddhist aim is nirvana, which means extinction and an
end of the cycle of reincarnation. Of course, this notion of an
infinitely old universe has been disproved.

I think the way you would
experience reincarnation as solace and reprieve from death is by
remembering your LAST lifetime now. Reincarnation of your soul isn't
going to be any good for you in the NEXT lifetime; it's only solace in
THIS lifetime.

So one of the things the Buddha
is supposed to have experienced during the 21 days after he was
enlightened under the Bodhi Tree was the recollection of his past lives.

I think what the myth of
"recollection of one's past lives" means is the realization that you
now are the leading edge of all the accumulation of human experience.
We are the present culmination of all previous lives human beings have
lived. And so when I think back about people who've lived
before--relatives, mentors, figures of history, etc.--I can understand
that that was "me" in an earlier life.

I am one with the Mind of All
Humankind.

Personal survival in an
afterlife isn't very relevant to spirituality.

In fact, the belief in heaven
and hell has allowed Christians to put off social justice and solution
to problems into a time after death, and kept people dependent on the
priestly caste for exoneration from Hell.

I say we only experience change.
Experiencing creates time. At the level of human brain, experience IS a
change in the polarity of the surface of a neuron. At the level of the
cosmos, change is gravity. The universe IS the propagation of activity
across the surface of spacetime, and the lines along which change
happens most smoothly warps space, and the "force" that shapes the
universe of matter is gravity. Gravity and change are indivisible and
both are a result of experiencing.

What is having the experience of
the universe?

In a twist on the Abbot and
Costello routine, maybe the answer to that question is "What." I mean,
it is asking the question "what?" which causes experience to happen.
The cosmos develops life and consciousness in order to ask the question
"What?" and asking the question is what causes the universe to develop
life and consciousness.

Toby Johnson, PhDis
author of nine books: three non-fiction books that apply the wisdom of
his
teacher and "wise old man," Joseph Campbell to modern-day social and
religious problems, four gay genre novels that dramatize spiritual
issues at the heart of gay identity, and two books on gay men's
spiritualities and the mystical experience of homosexuality and editor
of a collection of "myths" of gay men's consciousness.

Johnson's book
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of
Human Consciousness won a Lambda Literary Award in 2000.

His GAY
PERSPECTIVE: Things Our [Homo]sexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe was nominated for a Lammy in 2003. They
remain
in
print.

FINDING
YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth
of the Great Secret III tells the story of Johnson's learning the
real nature of religion and myth and discovering the spiritual
qualities of gay male consciousness.